STATE HOUSE ROUNDUP -- When Washington beckons

With his purple tie knotted tightly, Gov. Charlie Baker flew to Washington last week hoping to bring his brand of bipartisanship to the polarized capital.

Few might have predicted, however, that the colors in Washington were already starting to bleed.

Ostensibly, the state Legislature and Congress both returned to work from a summer recess last week, but it was the gridlocked Congress -- with an assist from President Donald Trump -- that would make the breakthrough.

As state legislators eased into their post-Labor Day schedule (and that's being generous), Trump struck a debt-ceiling deal with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to fund the government for three months and deliver billions in Hurricane Harvey relief funding.

Trump's shunning of Republican Congressional leaders to make a deal with the Democrats rattled Washington and seemed to put wind in the sails of the White House as they prepared to deal with another catastrophic hurricane -- Irma -- bearing down on South Florida.

The debt ceiling deal also distracted, if only for a fleeting moment, from the storm the president stirred up with his decision to phase out the immigration program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

The program created by President Barack Obama through executive order allowed the so-called "Dreamers" who were brought to the country illegally by their parents when they were minors to apply for protected status that would allow them to go to school and work without fear of deportation.

Trump, through his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, challenged Congress over the next six months to enshrine DACA into law if they want it preserved, while Democrats and many Republicans, including Baker, derided the move as a cold-hearted play for the conservative base that would send immigrants in the United States through no fault of their own back into hiding.

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey joined yet another multi-state lawsuit against the Trump administration to block the decision to end DACA, while advocate groups rallied at the State House and around Boston seeking leadership from the state to protect the futures of the Dreamers.

It was in this atmosphere that Baker joined his fellow governors from Tennessee, Montana, Colorado and Utah in testifying before the Senate health committee on steps Congress could take to stabilize Obamacare health insurance markets in the wake of failed efforts to repeal the law.

Baker and the bipartisan cohort of governors told the Senate panel, headed by Tennessee's Lamar Alexander, that the single biggest thing they could do would be to ensure at least two years of funding for cost-sharing reductions payments.

The CSR payments, used to keep patients' out-of-pocket expenses down, were a part of the Affordable Care Act, but have been challenged in court by Republicans and dangled by Trump as a lever he could pull for force the collapse of Obamacare.

"I think it would be a bad idea," Baker told U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren about Trump's threat, responding to a softball lobbed across the plate by Massachusetts' senior senator in what sounded like a coordinated back-and-forth designed to bloody the president.

Baker sat in the middle of the five governors as the de facto leader of the pack. He was given ample time to wonk out on health care policy, and just enough time to score some political points back home.

Secretary of State William Galvin also had a mind to deliver a blow to the president when he testified back at the State House in support of a bill that would disqualify a candidate like Trump from the presidential ballot if they refused to release their tax returns.

Should legislative efforts to restrict ballot access in that way fail, a proposed ballot question to accomplish the same objective became one of 21 petitions to clear their first hurdle on the road to the 2018 ballot after being certified by Healey.

Pending massive signature-gathering efforts, other petitions given the yellow light include proposals to lower the sales tax, raise the minimum wage from $11 to $15 and make paid family and medical leave the law the commonwealth.

Work left over from the last round of initiative petitions in 2016 has now fallen into the lap Steve Hoffman, the new chair of the Cannabis Control Commission, who met the press last week for the first time.

Hoffman, at least according to him, may have been one of those mythical voters who actually read the details of the pot legalization question and voted against it, but not for reasons you might think. No, Hoffman said he supported the goal of the petitioners, but opposed the question but because he felt the implementation timeline was unrealistic.

Ironically, Hoffman, who revealed that he last smoked pot with his wife last year in Colorado under a firework-lit sky on the Fourth of July, has inherited a schedule to license retail pot shops that some worry might be too aggressive. Hoffman said it's his goal to meet the July 2018 deadline, but added that "if it can't be done, it can't be done."

The first of September may have been move-in day across Boston, but for Dan Koh the big move was set to take place over the weekend.

Koh and his wife were moving to Andover, his hometown and a community firmly ensconced in the 3rd Congressional District, where the former chief of staff to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh plans to run for Congress.

He took the first step toward a run for the seat currently held by U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas Sept. 5 when he announced that he was setting up an exploratory finance committee. That announcement coincided with a decision from Ellen Murphy Meehan, a community hospital consultant and ex-wife of former Congressman and UMass President Marty Meehan, not to run for the seat when the Lowell Democrat retires next year.

Walsh gave his former top aide a moving gift by endorsing his bid for Congress, but it's questionable how much the thumbs-up from the Boston mayor will matter to voters in Merrimack Valley region.

The state of that race is now wide open, with Lowell Sen. Eileen Donoghue still weighing her options and a decision from another state senator, Andover Sen. Barbara L'Italien, expected soon.

On the other side of the equation, Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance Founder Rick Green, a Pepperell Republican, also announced that he had set up an account with the Federal Elections Commission to explore a run, and got his campaign started by sending a crock of Boston baked beans to City Hall for Koh to "remind him of home."